The 10 Best Books to Read This August

August is the final month of the summer book season, and it seems like many publishers were saving their most eclectic, off-beat titles for the sign of Leo. In The Last Days of New Paris, the City of Light detonates a “surrealist bomb” to repel the Nazi occupation in 1940. In Mr. Eternity, an old sailor who calls himself Daniel Defoe claims to be 560 years old. And in The Trees, an English suburb turns into a forest overnight.

“Máni Steinn is gay in a society in which the idea of homosexuality is beyond the furthest extreme. His city, Reykjavik in 1918, is homogeneous and isolated and seems entirely defenseless against the Spanish flu, which has already torn through Europe, Asia, and North America and is now lapping up on Iceland’s…